Flanders is the Dutch-speaking northern portion of Belgium and one of the communities, regions and language areas of Belgium. The official capital of Flanders is the City of Brussels.

Flanders, despite not being the biggest part of Belgium by area, is the area with the largest population (68.2%) if Brussels is included. 7,797,611 out of 11,431,406 Belgian inhabitants live in Flanders or the bilingual city of Brussels.

In medieval contexts, the original "County of Flanders" stretched around AD 900 from the Strait of Dover to the Scheldt estuary and expanded from there. This county also still corresponds roughly with the modern-day Belgian provinces of West Flanders and East Flanders, along with neighbouring parts of France and the Netherlands. Although this original meaning is still relevant, in modern times the term "Flanders" came to refer to a larger area, and is used to refer to the entire Dutch-speaking part of Belgium.

Flanders, by every definition, has figured prominently in European history since the Middle Ages. In this period, cities such as Ghent, Bruges, and later Antwerp made it one of the richest and most urbanized parts of Europe, trading, and weaving the wool of neighbouring lands into cloth for both domestic use and export.

Flanders (and Belgium as a whole) saw some of the greatest loss of life on the Western Front of the First World War, in particular from the three battles of Ypres. About 40,000 Belgian soldiers died during the war.

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